Little Things
There is always something new for me to discover. The little differences that are sometimes funny, sometimes weird and sometimes startling. For example I recently went to buy myself a notebook. Simple thing but it turned out to be quite a challenge. I'm used to using sheet with squares which I learned is called quad-ruled paper. This is quite hard to find as almost all notebooks are in lines. The most popular format is called college ruled which I suppose explains it's popularity. This looks like Polish single-line notebooks. And I haven't used them since I finished high school. And that was very long ago. I was done with Polish and the lined books. Even then I used the quad ruled for everything else. And I prefer them as one can write much more densely on the page and making tables and graphs is easier. Anyway I managed to finally find some squared paper but the squares were wrong. It's a weird feeling when something looks so familiar but at the same time you know it's wrong. This is were local measurement system stroked again. It turns out here there are two types of quad ruled notebooks here. Normal - 5x5 - and 4x4 which is in English system and the squares are just a little bit bigger. You can guess which one I chose (it's for the lab - we work in metric anyway and 5 squares = 1 cm). It surprised me that I could see they were the wrong size.
Another funny thing is finding familiar food on the shelves or even shops with foreign, specialty food. Especially when it's something like Hit cookies. For you American it's like for you would be finding Oreos in such section which I suppose happens somewhere. I also found here Maltesers, Wawel Dark Chocolate and Leibnitz cookies. Luckily for me I also found sour cucumbers - also called cucumbers in brine - from Poland. This is good as they are one of my favourite foods since kindergarden.
This is however nothing compared to finding familiar stuff that just doesn't taste right. American chocolate - Hershey - is not very good. It tastes more like the chocolate-like stuff from the 80s during the bad cocoa deficiency after Martial Law. It's like there is less cocoa and more sugar (but I'm not sure as they don't state the % of cocoa on the bars - suspicious in it's own way). Unfortunately local versions of Nestle and Milka chocolates seem to have the same problem. They just don't taste right. And the chips and other salty snacks are more salty and and ice creams are sweeter. I'm not able to swallow the non-carbonated drinks. They are so sweet they make me feel sick, they could be used for glucose tolerance test. At least carbon gives drink a slight bitter taste to offset the sweetness. This means that when I'm not able to make myself tea I drink Coca-Cola (Zero - I'm with John Scalzi - it tastes best). I never thought I'd say this but I'm starting to have enough of Cola.This led me to conclusion that the unhealthy food is even more unhealthy in US.
BTW KFC way, way superior in Poland. This was one fastfood I kind of liked in Poland. I decided to try it here - awful. Dry and tasteless. My Polish friends here blame the chickens.
Another funny thing is finding familiar food on the shelves or even shops with foreign, specialty food. Especially when it's something like Hit cookies. For you American it's like for you would be finding Oreos in such section which I suppose happens somewhere. I also found here Maltesers, Wawel Dark Chocolate and Leibnitz cookies. Luckily for me I also found sour cucumbers - also called cucumbers in brine - from Poland. This is good as they are one of my favourite foods since kindergarden.
This is however nothing compared to finding familiar stuff that just doesn't taste right. American chocolate - Hershey - is not very good. It tastes more like the chocolate-like stuff from the 80s during the bad cocoa deficiency after Martial Law. It's like there is less cocoa and more sugar (but I'm not sure as they don't state the % of cocoa on the bars - suspicious in it's own way). Unfortunately local versions of Nestle and Milka chocolates seem to have the same problem. They just don't taste right. And the chips and other salty snacks are more salty and and ice creams are sweeter. I'm not able to swallow the non-carbonated drinks. They are so sweet they make me feel sick, they could be used for glucose tolerance test. At least carbon gives drink a slight bitter taste to offset the sweetness. This means that when I'm not able to make myself tea I drink Coca-Cola (Zero - I'm with John Scalzi - it tastes best). I never thought I'd say this but I'm starting to have enough of Cola.This led me to conclusion that the unhealthy food is even more unhealthy in US.
BTW KFC way, way superior in Poland. This was one fastfood I kind of liked in Poland. I decided to try it here - awful. Dry and tasteless. My Polish friends here blame the chickens.